Making the Woodkit typeface system

Ondrej Jób is describing the process of designing Woodkit, a playful fixed-width display series of typefaces inspired by wood type.

Woodkit is a type system inspired by wood type and letterpress consisting of three families — Solid, Print and Reprint, each with six distinct styles covering various alphabet designs, components and miscellaneous ornaments. Woodkit supports Latin, Cyrillic and Greek scripts.

From both aesthetic and functional reasons, the most important feature of Woodkit is that every single glyph fills a square, not just horizontally, but also vertically. This is a reference and an homage to the physicality of the real life wooden blocks. It didn’t only induce some new and unexpected constructional solutions, it also gave the final font broad versatility, mutual interchangeability, many visual treats unavailable in proportional typefaces and most importantly — playfulness. Some of the fonts and shapes are outright inspired by wooden blocks and alphabets for kids. Therefore with Woodkit, typing also means building.

By now, it’s probably no big surprise that Woodkit originated as a custom logo for one of my friends. In March 2014, Zolo Kis of Mr. Wood asked me to design a logo for his new online store with wooden interior accessories. I came up with a logo constructed from simple blocks. I don’t know about kids these days, but the blocks were one of my most favourite things to play with. And apparently, I still have it in me today, even though it’s only on a computer screen. Just for fun, I quickly ‘built’ a whole alphabet, then a second and a third set, then numbers and I only stopped after Greek and Cyrillic were done.

I love quick and simple projects like this one, but I tend to complicate them for myself. And this was no exception – once I got the idea to actually release this, more styles started to pop up in my head, resulting in a rather extensive kit of letters, shapes, ornaments and patterns. There are six styles in each of the three Woodkit families: Letterpress, Alphabet A and B, Blocks, Figures and Ornaments.

Even though Letterpress style was the last to be added, it has the prominent first spot in the family as it is probably the most ‘typographic’ of the bunch. It draws inspiration from the 19th century wood type posters that literally competed in typographic overabundance of styles, colours and sizes.

I tried to capture just that in Woodkit Letterpress fonts. Every glyph seems to come from a different printer’s case with only a handful sharing a similar style. With everything mixed together and combined with the print artefacts and small defects, the text set in the Letterpress style appears warm and friendly.

When typing with basic ligatures turned on, the font automatically rotates between three different versions for each letter or number. When two same glyphs are typed together, the font replaces them with their narrow variants so they fill just a single square together, adding a little bit of spice into the mix. With contextual alternates turned on, five different versions are being rotated, three full square and two half square wide. And finally, when discretionary ligatures are turned on, the font rotates only between the two half square versions. All this combined together allows for a rich setting where no two words look alike.

The Alphabet A and B styles are as simple as they sound – they are inspired by the basic ABC blocks used by kids who are learning to read. Available in positive (A) or negative (B) versions, they are great for marking sections, typographic mosaics or as drop caps. Simple!

As mentioned above, the Blocks style represents the very essence of Woodkit. Every glyph is a unique stack of various blocks, there are no closed counters, no sharp corners and no complicated shapes that would be difficult to make in real wood.

With the basic ligatures feature on, the font rotates between three different versions for each letter and number.

I couldn’t resist including the Figures style in the family. It is the best demonstration of the playful character of Woodkit. I started to build first figures while drawing the Blocks style as it was a very natural thing to do. I stacked the blocks on top of each other to create letters, so why not try something else too? The result is almost 400 thousand possible figures – there are 78 heads, 8 arms, 8 legs and 8 trunks to choose from and 10 different hats to top it off.

And last but not least, there are Ornaments, a selection of 500 symbols, shapes, mid-century-inspired dingbats and seamless patterns to complement the other Woodkit styles.

Author’s tips

    • Use 100% leading (i.e. 20pt text size/20pt leading) to make the gap between lines and the space between glyphs equal.

    • Use the Glyph palette in your graphic application to pick from all available versions of each glyph (click and hold on a letter with a tiny arrow in the corner)

    • The style of each glyph always depends on the previous glyph. That means that changing the first letter in a word will affect all other letters following it. Quick and easy.

    • Every glyph is 1000 units wide and the tracking setting in your graphic application uses the very same units. That means that setting the tracking, e.g. to +500, will create gaps between the glyphs that are exactly half-glyph wide.

To wrap it up, here is a visual overview of the whole Woodkit system. All fonts are distributed in OpenType TT format (.ttf) and available for purchase exclusively from Typotheque.

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Graphic Design Industry Role Descriptions

If you’re a recent college graduate or if you’re just now entering the workforce, you’ve probably looked at and applied for dozens of design jobs. You’re probably aware of most of the popular job titles in the design industry including everything from junior art director, senior art director, art director and beyond; but after reviewing all the descriptions for each, you might still be a bit confused as to what each position does and how these positions fit in to the office hierarchy. This is because job titles and descriptions are confusing. Responsibilities differ from company to company and can depend on several factors including size, type of company, and even the skills of the employees that work there. For this article, I spoke to several designers, art directors, and creative directors hoping to learn how these roles differ from company to company. What I learned was that each company tends to use their creative teams in different ways. It is my hope that by sharing what I’ve learned that I can help to better prepare you for your transition into the workforce.


The Junior, Mid-Level, and Senior Designer

When you first start looking for a job as a graphic designer, it’s likely that one of the first things that you will do is visit a website like Monster.com and run a search for “graphic designer.” Your results will vary but it’s likely that each of you will see several listings for junior, mid-level, and senior designers. At a glance, these listings might appear to be quite similar but in reality you may find these positions to be quite different in terms of experience and responsibility.

So what exactly are the differences? The terms junior, mid, and senior typically refer to seniority. Designers with many years of experience typically hold more senior level positions while designers with less experience hold more junior ones.

A junior designer, for instance, is an entry level position, usually a college graduate with exceptional talent. Junior designers typically require heavy direction from a more senior designer, or art director to develop a project to its conclusion.

Mid-level designers generally have a couple years of experience in the industry and although they still require supervision from a more senior member of their team, they are typically more than capable of completing most tasks.

The senior designer should be one of the most experienced members of the creative team. They should have several years of experience and should be capable of executing projects with minimal direction from an art director. In addition, senior designers should be able to manage their time as well as the time of more junior level designers. In addition, senior designers should have a firm understanding of all levels of production and be capable of not only contributing to the design of a project but also communicating with the client.
While all of this seems rather cut and dry, it’s not. The role of the designer can change depending on the size of the company. A smaller studio, for instance, might be more hands on, relying on more junior level designers to interact with clients and make decisions regarding the direction of a project whereas a larger agency may have stricter guidelines and a clearer division of labor.

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Design How-To: Working with Photos

The popularity of digital cameras, coupled with their relative ease of use, makes it easier than ever to incorporate images into documents. But unless you've spent some time developing a photographer's eye, chances are the snapshots you take are general scenes filled with lots of unnecessary background and filler. The central focus -- and message -- of the image is diffused.

But you can add impact to even the most mundane image by judicious cropping and placement in your page layout.

In this feature from "Before & After Magazine," learn how to crop images for focus and position them for unity in a page layout.

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Interview: Graphic Designer Stephen Doyle

National Design Award–winner Stephen Doyle talks to Departures about the future of design.

The first project Stephen Doyle’s fledging firm took on in the mid-1980s was designing the cult magazine Spy. Since then, Doyle Partners’ work has included branding and logos (Martha Stewart, Cooper Union), editorial art (The New York Times, The New York Review of Books) and book covers (Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Stephen Colbert’s I Am America). In his spare time, Doyle builds intricate paper sculptures out of lines of text cut from books like Kafka’s Trial and Machiavelli’s Discourses, and last year he was honored at the White House with a National Design Award. Lately his studio has turned to architectural collaborations, working on design elements for Heritage Field, a new community park opening this fall in the Bronx (on the site of the former Yankee Stadium, which was torn down last year). And then there’s the exterior of the new shark tank at Coney Island’s New York Aquarium, set to open in 2015.
You seem to approach your subjects with what one might call the “euphoria of ignorance.”
Absolutely. To think your way out of a problem, you have to surrender to possibility and potential and imagination; otherwise it’s too overwhelming.

And what does ignorance afford you?
With my clients I often use the word “naïveté.” You have to think, What is it like for the user? How is someone who is uninitiated in this kind of thinking going to respond and react? We get to deal with things on a very human, personal level.

How do you go from Heritage Field and baseball parks back to designing covers for books by [Russian émigré novelist and Lolita author] Vladimir Nabokov?

It’s all about storytelling. Sometimes film actors come back to Broadway just to practice their craft. So to do an occasional book cover, like the stories of Nabokov, where I try to make the type come alive and tell a story, that’s where I get my kicks.

What’s the connection between design and storytelling?

Design is all about storytelling. Design is communicating with an audience through images and language and color and type and scale and nuance and subtlety and texture and tactility. Design is all those things and how they affect our senses.

What, to you, are the iconic images of American design?

The funny thing that springs to my mind is being in a Russian town called Saratov, on the Volga River. Horse meat was on the dinner menu, and afterward we were served four sticks of Wrigley’s gum on a silver tray. First the horse, then the chewing gum. I can’t get that image out of my mind: being in such a distant place and having something so familiar, so American, so iconic as a stick of gum.
The other thing, and this one is a little sad, is the Saarinen TWA terminal at JFK. When it was built, it expressed such optimism, such futurism, such buoyancy of spirit. Now JFK is a mess, worse than airports in some third world countries I’ve traveled to. These days we don’t have that same kind of gesture toward the future. I’m sad that New York hasn’t built any bridges in quite some time.

So that could be a design in the future—would you be interested in helping with that?
Just as long as I don’t have to do the engineering. Where are our big civic gestures? The optimism of building a bridge. We seem to be missing the chance to reimagine how we live.

Designing Heritage Field

The new Yankee Stadium, which opened in the Bronx in 2009, was built on land once occupied by a city park, so when the old stadium was torn down, in 2010, its site was set aside for a new park, opening this fall. To the design of Heritage Field, as the park will be called, Doyle Partners has added subtle yet powerful touches to tell the story of the stadium’s heritage. Done in blue threads of artificial grass, an outline showing the exact position of the original baseball diamond will be sewn into the turf. The site will also have binocular-style viewfinders showing 3-D images of historic events that took place there—Nelson Mandela’s 1990 visit, the 9/11 memorial—while other dates will be commemorated on hexagonal paving stones. “We’ve infiltrated the space with storytelling,” says Doyle.

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